Trying to get more users to pay for the service (while notably not reducing their ad profile or how many ads they see) strengthens my point: he’s clearly trying to maximize the value of an unwise purchase, and leveraging every saleable form of personal information is an obvious next step.
You’re confusing the conditionality of these: they’re not in conflict. They’re both means to the same unavoidable end: Twitter needs to make money, probably even be profitable, in order to not pose a rise to Musk’s other ventures.
He can make people pay, or not, or jack up tracking, or not. It doesn’t matter to me! The point is solely that he needs to do something.
> Twitter needs to make money, probably even be profitable, in order to not pose a rise to Musk’s other ventures.
Twitter needs to earn a profit, sure. That has always been true though. One way to make the company profitable is to increase revenue, which the $8/month blue check fee aims to do. The other way to make the company profitable is to cut overhead, which the mass layoffs aim to do.
I still don't get the concern trolling about data mining Twitter data: it's been done since the platform began.
The only unethical thing about the original article is selling location and movement data that is individually trackable, which is what this article is talking about from years ago when they worked at Twitter, which upper management was in favor of until Dorsey allegedly stepped in to halt.
Nevermind that there are other social media apps likely doing this already and selling better, more fine-grained data than Twitter can. Twitter is not as personal or intimate as other social media apps are with regards to insight into personal, private data. Everything shared on Twitter is understood to be public. They don't have access to private TikTok videos, 'destructible' Snapchat messages, text message data between couples, personal health search engine queries, etc.
Companies such as Facebook didn't need to sell super private mineable data to data mining firms to manipulate public opinion on election day, they were maximally profitable when they did, but they did it anyway. Twitter didn't need to shadow or outright ban doctors and politicians, or inject state-sponsored context alignment messaging (propaganda) into the newsfeed that disagreed with their internal company political alignment, but they did it anyways.
Nothing at this point, could be worse than the status quo for social media companies.
Elon/Twitter isn't even in the ballpark of maximizing profits yet. They are just trying to make the 1-1.5B debt payment that's going to come due. That's going to require huge cuts we just saw, plus advertisers to stay on board, plus Twitter blue, plus whatever else he can cook up. And, it still might not be enough.
I upvoted you, because AFAICT you’re correct that they plan to reduce (but not eliminate) ads with the new “blue” model.
I’m interested to see the degree to which they reduce ads for paying users: having a split ad/payment model is famous for producing “self-consuming” incentives, since the users who demonstrate the most purchasing power are the ones you promise not to advertise to.
Everything published on Twitter except for DMs is open to the whole internet to crawl. It is a public platform. I think it's fair game to serve you ads about Doritos if you are tweeting about potato chips and following Frito Lays.
Location based, privately identifiable, data is a bridge too far for me. But we also know for a fact other social media apps already do this if Twitter's app does not already do this currently.
The hype about Twitter being an unwise purchase is just noise from the peanut gallery. You should take such noise with a grain of salt.
Twitter was always under pressure to maximize value to shareholders. Same with every other tech company. Different companies sometimes make different trade-offs. I fail to see why Musk is somehow going to do any worse than what we've seen from social media companies over the past 15 years. But I do think there's a reasonable chance he'll do better.
Here’s the thing: it can be a bridge too far for you! It’s certainly a bridge too far for me. But neither of us matter, because it’s not our money on the line. It’s his money, a lot of his money, and the longer it hangs the more systemic risk it poses to his other ventures.
When I say it was an “unwise purchase,” what I mean is this: the stock market did not think Twitter was worth that much. Even when Elon was legally committed to purchasing Twitter, the deal seemed so manifestly absurd to the market that the price did not rise to meet his offer (which is as close as you can get to free money in the market). Is that the peanut gallery? Sure, but in no larger a sense than that our entire economy and value drive is controlled by the same system.
What you fear from Musk is the current status quo for all social media and other data mining tech cos like Google and Amazon. I really don't get the deep concern here about Musk upholding the status quo. He cannot do worse than Google, Facebook, TikTok, etc. And whatever data mining is going to occur on your tweets will happen anyways. It's a very public platform, it does not even have the intimate relationship graph or intimate private dm access that other social apps have.
The stock market did think Twitter was worth that much a year ago (Q2 2021 mcap was $51B). Of course the entire stock market shed trillions in market cap this year as the Fed relentlessly hiked rates. Musk clearly was trying to get a steeper discount factoring for the macro environment after the original offer, but it didn't work out. Can't say I blame him, if you can stall things in court to get an extra 10-20% discount from a $40B purchase like that, it's worth a shot.
When you offer to buy up an entire company and all the liquid shares on the market, you have to pay a premium. That's always the case for any buyout. For a while it looked like Musk was going to get away with walking away from the deal. That's why the market walked away from "free money".
The media's job is to dramatize everything. Especially when it's the drama machine itself, Twitter, at the center of it all. The media will do everything in its power to portray the Twitter purchase as chaotic, haphazard, unplanned, ill-considered, etc, because their own engagement metrics are driven by such takes.
At any rate I repeat my assertion that no worse can be done by Musk that has not already been done by Twitter, Facebook, TikTok, Google, et al. There's little to exploit there that hasn't already been exploited. Perhaps his subscription revenue ploy will work and he'll monetize with micropayments and other integrations. I hope so. I think there's a chance that version of Twitter is healthier than the ad and blue check insider peddling platform that has existed. Not guaranteed but it's a chance.
> What you fear from Musk is the current status quo for all social media and other data mining tech cos like Google and Amazon. I really don't get the deep concern here about Musk upholding the status quo.
Musk's entire publicly stated justification for purchasing Twitter was doing better than the status quo. He harped for months about Twitter as a public service, the importance of transparency in moderation, made extraordinary claims about Twitter falsifying its ad and engagement numbers, and so forth.
"He can't be worse" is simply not the point. His stated goal was to be better; we've seen no earnest attempt to do so (and plenty of earnest attempts at value extraction).
> "He can't be worse" is simply not the point. His stated goal was to be better; we've seen no earnest attempt to do so (and plenty of earnest attempts at value extraction).
Sure, we have. We've seen him charge an earnest fee for a premium service that Twitter previously withheld behind a mysterious bureaucracy that arbitrarily decided who did and did not get a blue check mark. We found that employees at Twitter were charging as much as $15K to pull strings for people for that blue check.
That's already objectively better. $8 a month to verify you are who you represent yourself to be and to get less ads, more access to revenue generation features from your audience, etc? Sounds fine. It's absurd to have some mysterious service that no one really knows the rules or thresholds for. It creates the very pay for play schemes that were the status quo.
